A Bright SUNSHINE Christmas Cruise Report

Greetings all! This is going to be a review/report of our 12/15/13 sailing on the Carnival Sunshine! This is my first review so bear with me as I get the hang of it. I will be including pictures. I will also be happy to answer any questions that I can. I will try to be as fast and efficient as possible so as to not leave you guys hanging too much, hopefully a post or 2 each day over the next week. I Hope you all enjoy the report as much as we enjoyed the trip! First post will be along shortly!

This was my 4th cruise, all with Carnival. I am Steven, and on the trip with me was my wife Christy. My wife and I have been on all 4 cruises together, starting with the Glory in '10, Conquest and Dream in '12, and Sunshine '13. We also sailed with another couple, my wife's cousin and her husband, Alicia and Jason (They joined us on our Dream cruise, their first). We are close in age with them and hang out together a lot. From this point on I will refer to my wife as "C" and Alicia and Jason as "A/J". We were all celebrating several things on this trip. My wife and I originally planned this trip for our 10 year anniversary in May. We were going to go in March during spring break, but found the week before Christmas to be quite a bit cheaper, plus we were both off the week after Christmas. As well as our anniversary we were celebrating Christmas and my wife's birthday (Jan. 2nd). A/J were celebrating their 2nd anniversary and J's graduation from his master's degree program. Here we all are:

Christy (Wife) and Steven (Me)

Alicia and Jason

So we actually booked this cruise at about 102 days out, which is a bit last minute for me. We are usually booked about a year out. I am an obsessive compulsive planner and need plenty of time to hammer out the plans. Since we had sailed from NOLA before on the Conquest, on the same itinerary I felt comfortable that I could pull it all together. I was originally looking at a lido balcony, but when doing a mock-booking online I noticed the spa balconies were only $100 more total. So we went for that. I called my PVP and got it all booked. My PVP told me that he showed a future cruise certificate on my account and asked if I wanted him to apply it. Now, I was confused because we had purchased one on the Conquest, but used it on the Dream...but I said sure apply it! I got an email the next day from Carnival customer service that there was an issue with the certificate, so I called. What had happened is that when I originally purchased it in the Conquest they had put it in my name but billed it to the wrong cabin. So apparently the reissued a new one and billed it correctly, which was the one I used on the Dream. So this second one was actually not paid for. So she asked if I wanted to pay for it and apply it. Of course I did! That meant that I basically paid $100 on the remaining balance of the cruise and got $100 OBC! SCORE!!!

We planned to stay in NOLA the night before the cruise and 2 nights after. Last time we were down we stayed at the Holiday Inn Superdome, but this time their prices were double what we paid. So I settled on the Holiday Inn Westbank Tower. I have a rewards account with the Holiday Inn brand so I try to stay loyal to them. Got a good rate, $129/night, with parking included for the duration of the cruise.

Nice review

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We live in Knoxville, TN so the drive down to NOLA is about 7 hours. We left home about 7am, just as it started raining. No big deal, we'd have warm sunny weather soon enough. We stopped about 2 hours in for our traditional Cracker Barrel road trip breakfast. Coming from TN the drive down to NOLA is sooooooo boring. We drove through Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. It is a whole bunch of nothing with miles and miles in between exits. At one point around noon I had to pee really bad. We didn't need gas yet but I could not wait. So I finally found an exit with one gas station. I pulled in and went in to the restroom. It had to be the most disgusting restroom I have ever seen. I felt pretty certain that I had contracted an STD just from walking in there:eek:! We arrived to the hotel in NOLA about 445pm. Smooth check-in and fantastic staff there. Here is the room we stayed in:

I had requested the highest floor possible with a river view. One note on this hotel is that one side faces the expressway and the other faces the river. The reviews said that the expressway side was very noisy. We ended up on the 7th floor with a view right in the middle, half expressway half river. The room was very spacious because the hotel is round, it gives more floor space. It was clean and comfortable. The bed was a bit firmer that I prefer, but I have a Tempurpedic at home so it's hard to please me when it comes to a bed. We had dinner in the hotel restaurant. It's called the Roundhouse, because, it too is round. The prices are not too bad and the food was actually pretty good. C had a burger and I had a buffalo chicken salad. We split some nachos. The total was going to be about $34, but the waitress noticed my keycard said priority rewards member and told me we got 20% off since we were in the priority club! AWESOME! I would have totally paid full price had she not mentioned it. I ended up tipping her what I was originally planning to plus the 20% that she saved me. I was a server for a few years and tend to overtip if I get good service. She ended up with about a $15 tip, but hey it was almost Christmas and she saved me money! We stopped by the front desk on the way back to the room to ask about a taxi to the port the next day and the lady gave me a card for Geaux taxi service. I called and scheduled him to be there at 9am the next morning. As we were getting ready for bed we noticed that there was only one light switch for the bathroom. The problem with that is that the shower/toilet has a door, but the vanity area is open to the room. So if someone in the room is getting ready in the morning the light will potentially wake up anyone still sleeping. It didn't bother us too much as we get up at the same time anyway.

Great review! Looking forward to the rest. Thank you for sharing!

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I can't wait to hear more about your cruise! Thank you for taking time to put a review together for us readers. :)

Sounds good so far. thanks for the review.

Too funny about the rest stop bathroom:D Hotel room looks nice though. Looking forward to the rest of your review.

What hotel did you stay at?

Nice start to your review.

Looking forward to your review. Love your pictures so far. please...LOTS of pictures. :)

Great start. Cant wait for the rest.

What hotel did you stay at?

We stayed at the Holiday Inn Westbank Tower in Gretna. It is about 12 minutes from the port and you can see the port from the riverside of the hotel. It was $129 for the night before the cruise and included breakfast and parking for the length of the trip. It was a nice place and I will for sure stay there again.

Included in the price of our hotel was breakfast at the hotel restaurant the morning of embarkation, a $16 value. If it weren't included I wouldn't have paid for it for 2 reasons, one is that it wasn't anything special, and two I was saving up for a Guy's burger for lunch! I had a half a bagel and the rest of the group had various other stuff, nobody complained, but nobody raved either. The taxi driver actually came in the restaurant to let us know he was there, about 10 minutes early. It took us about 12-15 minutes to get to the port and we arrived about 930am. My wife and I had FTTF so we were able to go to the priority line to check in. It didn't really matter though because we were so early that A/J checked in right next to us and got a zone 1 card. We were on board about 1115am.

Just a side note on the FTTF. It really didn't benefit us much this cruise. We arrived early enough that we would have been zone 1 and A/J actually were only about 5 minutes behind us boarding. Our room wasn't exactly ready, although we did drop off our carry-on's and met the steward who said he'd have the room complete in 30 minutes. We didn't really care because we only wanted to drop our bags. Our luggage did arrive really fast though, before noon. We didn't use the priority tender or the guest services line. I am back and forth on whether I will purchase it again. It could come in handy, but it really wasn't necessary for us this trip.

We all had Guy's for lunch and it was really good. Myself and J both got the pig patty. Just for the record the burger was really good, but the bacon patty SUCKED! It was overly crisp and mostly fat. I did try it again the next day and the same thing. So, I preferred the bacon bits from the topping bar, along with the sauteed onions. The fries...SO GOOD!

Following are some general pics around the ship, as this seems like as good a time as any to post them.

This is the automatic hand-washers located in the lido buffet area. It was really cool, like a car wash for your hands. The first time I used it there were no paper towels. But the rest of the week I didn't find that to be a problem as there were always paper towels stocked. I used this thing several time a day each day! It was kinda fun:D

The Sunshine Atrium

Looking down into the Atrium

The ship was all decorated for Christmas:

The Library Bar

The Taste Bar

The Shake Spot / Java Blue Coffee Bar

The Red Frog Pub

The Sunrise Dining Room (Aft, YTD Room)

I loved the lights in here!

Love your review so far. We are from Morristown, TN and are cruising out of Cocoa Beach this Saturday on the Dream. We are thinking of driving to New Orleans next time...it is about the same amount of time driving there as to Florida.

After lunch and taking some pictures around the ship we headed to the first trivia. We feel that we are highly intelligent and that there is very little competition with the trivias, but we go anyway:p I for one am a well of useless knowledge. Ask me what I did last weekend and I can't remember, but for some reason I can remember all sorts of useless trivia knowledge. Comes in handy on Carnival though:D It was general knowledge and we tied with 2 other teams. The social host Alex asked for the capitals of random countries as the tie breaker, and after 2 rounds I got the capital of Argentina correct and we won. BTW, it's Buenos Aries, incase you were wondering;) We won a medal. When we asked where the Ship on a Stick was Alex told us that they didn't have any. WHAT?!?!:eek: Oh well, medals it would be for the week!

On a side note, we played a lot of the trivias this week. I have to say that the Sunshine staff has some good ones. And they are not the usual ones you get on every Carnival cruise. The have updated the questions and created some new games, which we appreciated and enjoyed.

After we finished the game we introduced ourselves to Alex the social host. He was awesome! He is from Russia and is the first Russian to ever be on the Carnival entertainment staff. He used to be a bar waiter, but really wanted to be on the entertainment staff and finally made it. He was very proud to have his position and was quite good at it. We did hear some people complaining from time to time thru the week because of his accent, but we never found him hard to understand, and he was happy to repeat himself if you missed what he said. It was actually annoying to hear people complaining about it. We had a blast with him, he has a great sense of humor and loves his job! Here he is being silly and posing for a picture for us:D

If you are on the Sunshine soon and see him, take the time to talk to him. You will enjoy him!

I am going to break here for the evening but I will be back tomorrow with more. Writing this is more time consuming than I anticipated, but I am enjoying it! I appreciate everyone reading along so far, and appreciate the nice comments!

Love your review so far. We are from Morristown, TN and are cruising out of Cocoa Beach this Saturday on the Dream. We are thinking of driving to New Orleans next time...it is about the same amount of time driving there as to Florida.

You will enjoy the Dream, we had a great time on her last November! I love the deck that goes all the way around Promenade and kind of missed it on the Sunshine. I recommend going out of NOLA, I feel like it is actually a couple of hours shorter of a drive than to Canaveral, but the drive to Canaveral is not near as boring! Thanks for reading along and have a blast on your cruise!

We are cruising with a 4 yr old that really loved the large splash pad on the Fascination (one of the older, smaller ships). From the pictures I have seen it seems the Splash pad for the little ones is really small on the Sunshine and I don't see a lot of seating.

Could you shed some light on this?

We have never sailed Royal Carribean but they seem to have a great kids splash zone on the Freedom.

I like the Sunshine's itinerary to Aruba and Curacao though.

thanks

Loving the review so far! Just booked my cruise tonight to set sail on April 6th! Question about your hotel...how much was it for the taxi to the port? Do you know if they offered free shuttle from airport? Thank you!

We are cruising with a 4 yr old that really loved the large splash pad on the Fascination (one of the older, smaller ships). From the pictures I have seen it seems the Splash pad for the little ones is really small on the Sunshine and I don't see a lot of seating.

 

Could you shed some light on this?

 

We have never sailed Royal Carribean but they seem to have a great kids splash zone on the Freedom.

I like the Sunshine's itinerary to Aruba and Curacao though.

 

thanks

I did not really use that area, but my wife snapped a couple of pics. I don't think they will help you much though, but here ya go anyways:

There were some tables and chairs around that area, but not super close, they looked like this:

They were a little more towards the railing. I thought the splash bucket thing was cool, but after embarkation day, we never made it back there again even though we meant to. Sorry I can't help you more. I also have no basis to compare to the Fascination either.